Terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman has an interesting piece for the National Interest in which he argues that the use of relatively untrained lone-wolf radicals isn't representative of al-Qaeda's relative weakness since 9/11 but is in fact part of a new strategy meant to overwhelm the West's defenses by "flood[ing] already-stressed intelligence systems with 'noise' and with low-level threats from 'lone wolves' and other jihadi hangers-on (i.e., low-hanging fruit) that will consume the attention of law-enforcement and intelligence agencies in the hope that these distractions will allow more serious operations to slip by unnoticed."
This strategy, Hoffman says, is working, citing the successful attack on the CIA base at Khost and failed underwear bomber Umar Abdulmutallab's penetration of airport security, as well as the increasing frequency of homegrown terror plots here in the U.S.
It's a thoughtful piece, although I'd argue that this new strategy could also be seen as arising from al-Qaeda's recognition that their capacity for carrying out dramatic, high-casualty attacks like 9/11 has been diminished. Surely they'd prefer to execute another 9/11-style attack even more than a successful airplane underwear bombing. I'd also argue that a great deal of our inability to deal effectively with homegrown radicalism is that outreach to the Muslim community is portrayed by Republicans as appeasement, an inadequate substitute for broad measures that would have the effect of treating Muslims as second-class citizens. The issue is so politically volatile that the president has to pretend he isn't doing it. How something plays politically has become the sole metric for evaluating counterterrorism policy. This is part of why the administration has been touting the temporary success of the drone strikes targeted at suspected terrorist targets, something which, Hoffman points out, is at the very least an imperfect measurement of al-Qaeda's operational strength.
Hoffman's endorsement of Republican Rep. Frank Wolf's proposal to institutionalize a "Team B" group of outside intelligence experts to "challenge the prevailing conventional wisdom within government" seems like a bad idea for related reasons. The original 1970s Team B was wrong about everything, and mostly served as a way for Soviet hawks to make their paranoia look super official. I shudder to think what such a project would look and sound like now, especially given that the U.S. is fighting an enemy whose express goal is to get us to overreact and a party that seems to believe their political interests are served by doing exactly that. More than a "Team B," we need a public discourse on terrorism appropriate for adults, let alone political leaders.
-- A. Serwer
